Not a Happy Camper (14 page)

As we headed down The Park Road, Katahdin came into view. Henry David Thoreau, whose masterpiece
Walden
would bore me to distraction in my sophomore year English class at Brandeis University, wrote an essay on this mountain in which he described it as an example of “primeval, untamed and forever untamable nature”. While everyone else in the van oohed and aahed, it was at
this moment I knew it was not in my nature to enjoy nature. Forget Thoreau. As I looked up at this purple mountain's majesty, I recalled the legendary words of my great-grandmother Malka, as she wrapped her good candlesticks in an apron on the eve of her journey from Pinsk to Ellis Island: “Oy, such a schlep. Remind me why we're doing this again?”

Of course, one glance at Kenny and my heart flooded with the promise of the new world that lay ahead—if I could just survive the trip. The last six and a half miles of the van ride took us down a gravel road to Togue Pond Gate and the Rangers' Station. It was around four o'clock when we checked in and headed for the Roaring Brook Campground.

“I think it's time for a nap,” Dana announced and then yawned.

“How can you climb a mountain if you can't even ride in a car?” Kenny snapped. “Don't you think we should set up our tents and build a fire?”

“Well, okay, if I had any idea how to do that,” she replied.

“I'm an Eagle Scout. I can do it,” Kenny said.

“You're an Eagle Scout?” El Mosquito was surprised.

“Well, close,” Kenny backpedaled. “Had a little run-in with the Scoutmaster.”

“How was that?” Keith laughed. “He ran into you smoking pot?”

Kenny reddened. “Wish my dad laughed that hard when he found out.”

As it turned out, disqualified scout Kenny was the only one who knew how to do anything. I wanted to help, as an excuse to stay close by, but the best thing we could all do was keep out of the way. I joined the group over by the van where we broke open a bag of Chips Ahoy! Cookies and watched the sun set over a mountain I prayed would disappear by morning.

“Girls, stop eating!” Kenny called over, once the fire was going. “I need you to come make dinner.”

Now I'd always thought camping out meant cooking hot dogs and hamburgers, but the Kin-A-Hurra kitchen staff had supplied us with nothing but chicken parts and raw carrots, to be washed down with ten more industrial-size cans of peach nectar. I planned on filling my canteen from the lake.

Keith volunteered to cook, but right in the middle of the barbecue it started to rain. As each batch of poultry was freshly burnt, it was brought inside the girls' tent, which became our makeshift picnic ground. After we'd chowed down and strewn little wish-bones all across our living space, it stopped raining and was time to go outside again, to build another fire and to do the thing I most couldn't do, sing.

Dana started us off with the requisite
Blowin' in the Wind
. Taxed by the pressure of trying to look like I was singing when I was not, I decided to take a break after the first song.

“I need to go brush my teeth,” I told Julie. “And maybe, if I have to,” I gulped, “use the outhouse.”

Julie the urbanite was as grossed out as I was. “They never show you that part on
Bonanza
,” she complained. “They make it look like the Ponderosa was one big party.”

Julie suggested I go with a buddy, “In case a moose or something attacked us.”

“So if a moose attacks one of us, the other's supposed to save them?” I asked.

“Okay, never mind,” said Julie. “Just go.”

“I'll go with you,” said Mindy Plotke. “In case a moose attacks you, I want to see that.”

Now I am proud to say that I have never had a cavity, though it's not for lack of eating sugar. I simply brush my teeth. A lot. Though
not as much as those people with the hand washing issues. My buddy of the moment, Mindy Plotke, had that covered.

I spat out a mouthful of Colgate then swished a sip from my canteen.

“How can you drink that?” she asked me, then produced a bottle of clear liquid featuring a picture of a mountain peak.

“What's that?” I asked.

“Bottled water. I had my parents ship me a case.”

“Bottled water? You paid for water?”

It was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard.

“It's so much purer,” she explained as she unwrapped a cake of soap.

“Just seems a little weird.”

“No, I'll tell you what's weird,” Mindy Plotke said. “Those songs around the campfire. Don't you wonder why we always sing folk songs at camp?”

“Not really. We're at camp. This is what you sing.”

“Yes, but why? Why these songs of longing and desperation? I smell fraud, don't you? I mean, aren't we essentially a bunch of rich, spoiled kids whose greatest worries in life are being picked last in gym class or wait-listed at Tufts?”

Mindy Plotke was the youngest captain in the history of her high school debate team and I was finding out why.

“American folk songs hearken back to the days of slavery,” she went on, “but haven't we as Jews managed to avoid that since fleeing the Pharaoh in favor of desk jobs? Where did we come off singing, ‘All my trials, Lord, soon be over'? How do
we
identify with that?”

“Um. Uh...”

“Exactly,” Mindy Plotke broke in, and then I think she had an epiphany or some other brain malfunction.

“Or wait a minute,” she said. “On second thought, this
is
about the religion. At Jewish weddings, when the groom crushes a wine glass with his shoe, it's to commemorate the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem because even in our greatest moments of joy, we must remember tragedy.

My mother told me the tragedy was breaking a perfectly good glass.

“Perhaps,” she went on, “we sing folk songs at camp because even though things seem perfectly fine, as Jews, we're trained to anticipate disaster at any moment and then cling to some fleeting hope-”

“And sing about it?” I asked. “I don't know...”

“But these songs aren't just for Jewish summer camps,” she noted, “so maybe it's more of a widespread adolescent cry, a plea for a different kind of change, internal as opposed to external. With hormones raging out of control, coupled with an inability to understand what is happening to us, perhaps the only way to release the pent-up frustration and anxiety is by shaking our fists in the air and boldly screaming out, ‘Yes! Someone's crying, Lord! KumBa-Yah, dammit!'”

She was sure she was onto something.

“That must be it, right? Tell me I'm right. There is no other explanation.”

I could think of one.

“Or maybe it's just because the words are easy to learn?”

Mindy Plotke was rendered speechless.

“You know my bunkmate, Betty Gilbert?” I asked. “You two might be good as friends.”

“That sleepwalking, book-reading freak?” Mindy P. exclaimed. “She hates camp. She doesn't get it.”

“I just thought, y'know, you're both sort of afraid of germs and-”

But I never got to finish. Mindy Plotke washed her hands of me and walked away.

Upon my return to the campfire, I found Dana leading the group in
You've Got a Friend
. Standing apart from the others, listening and watching, I discovered I was pleased she'd brought along her guitar, regretting I'd been annoyed when she first showed up. I was out in the middle of nowhere with everything in my life in flux, but as one song segued into another, finally ending with
Goodnight Irene
, all I could think was,
This is what camp is supposed to be like,
and I wanted the night to last forever.

It almost did last forever. I couldn't sleep. The ground was hard and uneven and no matter which way I turned it felt like rocks were growing under my sleeping bag. Around two AM, I sat up straight when I heard the piercing cries of what sounded like victims in a bad Japanese monster movie. Had the prowlers followed us here?

“Relax, it's just loons,” Dana said in the dark.

“Loons? You mean crazy people?”

“No. I mean loons.”

Loons. Black-and-white-checked web-footed birds found in northern waters during the summer months. The wailing sounds were their method of communicating across long distances, much the way my mother would call to me when she was watching TV in the den and I was upstairs in my bedroom and she wanted a piece of rye bread from the kitchen.

By five AM I was growing restless. I pulled on the old pants I'd worn on the van ride and got up to take a walk. Just as I stepped outside, Julie woke up and screamed.

“Ahhhhh! Moose! It's a moose!”

Everyone else woke up and joined in the screaming.

“Moose! Moose!”

“Oh God! It's right outside the tent!”

“It's gonna kill us and eat us!”

I didn't see the moose, but was terrified nonetheless. I dove back inside.

“Oh, it's just you.” Julie said.

Everyone calmed down when they realized there was no moose, just me, standing outside in my brown painter's pants. I decided not to wear them again that summer.

The new day officially began at 5:30AM with a breakfast of O'Boyle's leftovers. On a fresh sugar high, we packed up camp and set out. Kenny took on the task of hauling a bulky old canvas backpack containing assorted supplies. He looked uncomfortable and I was tempted to offer to share the load, but didn't want to risk appearing to call him a weakling.

“Shouldn't someone help him?” I quietly asked Dana. “I mean, at least one of the other boys?”

“He loves this stuff,” she assured me. “He thinks torture makes him look cool, like a junior Jim Norbert.”

“You're so mean to him,” I marveled.

“I almost didn't come on this trip because of him,” Dana explained. “Like it's my fault I didn't want to be his girlfriend. Enough already. Get over it. Let him get some other girlfriend.”

Yes, let him.

As Kenny struggled under the weight of his load, all I had to carry were my camera, flashlight and canteen. There would be no stops along the way for refills, so the amount of water each of us had for the day was limited, to roughly what your average Los Angelino now consumes while crossing the parking lot from the Hummer to the Starbuck's.

“So how do we do this, Julie? Where do we start?” Dana asked.

“Um, Kenny?” was her reply.

It was obvious who would be in charge here.

“As long as we stick to the most popular route, Chimney Pond Trail, nothing will go wrong,” Kenny assured us. Flashlights on, we trudged through the dark over loose, craggy rock and gravel for two hours.

“This isn't so bad,” I said to Dana. “I'll bet we're almost there.”

“Congratulations,” Kenny announced when we reached Chimney Pond, “we are now officially at the beginning of the hike.”

It was pointless to complain. Julie had that covered.

“The beginning? So why didn't we drive here?”

“Because there's no roads,” Kenny told her. “And the whole point is to hike. Remember? That's why we're here.”

Once we'd passed through a quarter mile of scrub, we emerged to find the view had changed. The sun was now shining brightly on Mt. Katahdin, though we could not yet see the peak. What we saw was a steep wall of boulders. The next phase of the trip, Cathedral Trail, was the most direct route to the top that didn't involve crampons and ropes and scaling the face of the mountain. During the drive, Kenny had read through a booklet about Katahdin and now pulled it from his back pocket, happily providing us with information.

“A sudden and unexpected slide in 1967 wiped out a significant portion of this trail.”

“How do we know there won't be another slide today?” Julie asked.

“Pardon, but for a group leader, you're not very reassuring,” Keith remarked.

Kenny skimmed ahead. “Says here Cathedral Trail got its name from the vertical slabs of rock that jut out. Supposed to remind hikers of cathedral spires.”

“Oh, please,” whined Julie, “the vertical slabs of rock that jut out remind me that we'll be spending the next few hours climbing over vertical slabs of rock that jut out.”

Despite my borrowed dungaree-induced restricted knee movement, I'd easily been able to keep up so far. As Kenny reached over his head and found a place to grab onto the first boulder, I brushed past the boys from the Wolverines and made myself second in line. I was about to tap Kenny on the shoulder, check in, say hi and offer some words of encouragement, hoping in turn he'd notice my facility for mountain climbing and ask me to be his date for the Banquet Social at the end of the summer. Instead, he lost his footing and re-balanced himself by pushing his left boot against my head.

Kenny looked back. “Oh, it's you,” he said, then squinted in the sun. “Why do you look different?”

Ah, good, he'd noticed. I was afraid I hadn't taken extreme enough measures when I'd opted not to address the lack of knockers problem. I was still a double-A, a size sometimes referred to as a “training bra,” as if I somehow needed more practice before signing up for the official Boob Olympics. I'd heard that a couple of Stay-Free Maxi Pads wedged into your bra could do the trick, but even with their handy dandy self-adhesive strip, I couldn't imagine how they'd remain in place during a day-long hike or that they'd feel particularly comfortable.

The truth was, I liked my small chest. I was an athlete and it seemed so convenient. Wouldn't double-D's get in the way if I was up at bat in a crucial late inning, trying to pull the ball to right? I'd always thought these were the two best parts of my body, if I really had to think about them. Along with my ears. I had pretty good ears, if anyone was looking, which they weren't because I didn't wear earrings because my mother considered piercing cannibalistic and I probably would have been losing them all the time anyway
and then my parents would yell at me, so really, why bother in the first place? But I thought my ears were pretty good nonetheless. Nice and petite. All I ever really wanted was for the rest of my body to have been built to match.